“What,” her young son demanded as he boarded his first
commercial flight, “are all these people doing on our plane?”

Charming -- if you’re Marie Antoinette. When the gauche,
noveau riche Siegels face their inevitable comeuppance, we can’t
help but enjoy a twinge of schadenfreude.

Filmed over three years beginning in 2007, “Versailles”
opens with a boom -- the housing boom. David Siegel, a self-made
Florida billionaire and founder of Westgate Resorts, is building
a $75 million, 90,000-square-foot mansion outside Orlando.

Modeled on both the original Versailles and Las Vegas’s
Paris hotel, the Siegels’s behemoth was to be the largest home
in America. Jackie, a former cocktail waitress 30 years younger
than her husband, boasts of closets that could shame most living
rooms.

Stop Gap

Then 2008 happens. The housing bubble bursts, Siegel’s
company, which sells time-share vacations, lays off workers, and
the dream home sits unfinished, a brick and mortar metaphor for
our grasping, mortgaged times.

What might be little more than, say, fodder for a “60
Minutes” segment becomes, in Greenfield’s telling, a resonant
character study.

David, the gruff mogul with a working-class background,
greed-is-good drive and eye for beauty-pageant types, earns our
attention, if not affection, with his thorough lack of
sentiment.

“Nothing makes me happy these days,” he says late in the
film, his self-worth seemingly wrapped completely in his
fortunes. (Siegel, now 77, is suing the director, Magnolia
Pictures and Bravo Media for what he claims is a damaging and
false depiction of his company).

The queen, of course, is Jackie, a bottle-blonde shopaholic
in too-tight outfits. As endearing as she is vulgar and
exasperating, Jackie Siegel surprises us at every turn.

“My husband told me when I turned 40 he’s going to trade
me in for two 20-year-olds,” Jackie says at one point. Her
husband’s joke isn’t even remotely funny, and the beauty of the
film is that we know she knows.

“The Queen of Versailles,” from Magnolia Pictures, is
playing in New York and Los Angeles. Rating: **** (Evans)

‘Dark Knight’

Filmed on a scale and with a solemnity that dwarfs Mt.
Rushmore, “The Dark Knight Rises” provides not quite three
hours of pounding excitement.

The movie is a sledgehammer. Your head is the anvil.

It feels very much like the last Batman picture, “The Dark
Knight” (2008). There’s the same trio of splendid actors --
Michael Caine, Gary Oldman and Morgan Freeman -- occasionally
acting. There’s recessive Christian Bale as Bruce Wayne/Batman,
who martyrs himself to save the people of his city.

Marion Cotillard is a rich investor in an energy project
that turns deadly. Tom Hardy plays the main villain in a metal
pig-snout mask that would render expression impossible if he
were given something to express.

Anne Hathaway

Joseph Gordon-Levitt is more winning as a Robin-like young
cop. Best of all, Anne Hathaway, as Selina Kyle/Catwoman, brings
to this movie what Heath Ledger brought to the last one: a touch
of lightness and mocking humor. Amid the gloom, she sparkles.

The picture is effective; I certainly wasn’t bored. But its
frantic mixture of 9/11, the financial crisis, Abu Ghraib, the
Paris Commune, the Bolshevik Revolution and “A Tale of Two
Cities” is a pop-culture hodgepodge that doesn’t pop -- it
thuds.

It’s also confusing. The director, Christopher Nolan, can
stage mayhem on a colossal scale, but he doesn’t know where to
place the camera to make a simple fistfight or a gunfight
intelligible.

The Imax process doesn’t permit long takes; maybe that’s
why the editing is too fast to follow. Or maybe it’s just inept.
You pretty much have to accept everything that happens on faith,
which is the movie’s theme.

The ending isn’t as corny as “The Dark Knight,” but it’s
still about a big mope’s desire to furnish the little people
with hope. If fate hadn’t led Bruce Wayne to become Batman, he
would have made a fine pastor.

Is that what Nolan wants, too? Is that why this movie feels
so condescending?

“The Dark Knight Rises,” from Warner Bros., is playing
across the U.S. Rating: **1/2 (Seligman)

‘Well Digger’s Daughter’

“The Well Digger’s Daughter” is a remake of a 1940 film
by Marcel Pagnol about a poor girl seduced by a roue.

The new version is French “Masterpiece Theatre,” a period
piece (it’s set at the beginning of World War I) in which
poppies sway in the fields and even the dirt looks clean.

The movie is coated with a sludge of lilting music by
Alexandre Desplat. Neither intellectually nor psychologically
respectable, it still managed to suck me in.

Daniel Auteuil adapted, directed and awarded himself the
juicy role of the well digger who, in the movie’s most famous
scene, gives the haughty parents of his daughter’s seducer a
piece of his mind.

Jean-Pierre Darroussin is touching as the cad’s father,
caught between his conscience and his harridan of a wife. As the
fallen daughter, Astrid Berges-Frisbey has the eyes-downcast
beauty a man could lose his head over and a stiff-necked
primness that would send him packing fast.

Auteuil has wisely made no attempt to update the material.
The emotions that swirl around notions of proper sexual behavior
make no sense in contemporary terms. They were probably wishful
thinking even in 1940.

“The Well Digger’s Daughter,” from Kino Lorber, is
playing in New York and Seattle. Rating: *** (Seligman)

What the Stars Mean:
**** Excellent
*** Very Good
** Good
* Mediocre
(No stars) Avoid

(Greg Evans and Craig Seligman are critics for Muse, the
arts and leisure section of Bloomberg News. Opinions expressed
are their own.)

(Muse highlights include Zinta Lundborg on N.Y. weekend and
Lewis Lapham on books.)